Lehi

Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, was a Zionist paramilitary organization in Mandatory Palestine that was founded in August 1940 by Avraham Stern. The group sought to create "a totalitarian Hebrew republic", and fascism was its official ideology until 1942; it sought to push the United Kingdom out of Palestine by force and to allow the unrestricted immigration of Jews to a Jewish state. The group split from Irgun so that it could continue its insurgency against the British, and Lehi offered to fight alongside Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in return for the fascist governments returning all Jews from Nazi-occupied Europe to Palestine. Lehi saw Adolf Hitler as a lesser evil and the British as a greater evil, but Stern's death in a police confrontation in 1942 led to Lehi instead aligning itself towards Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Lehi lost support due to its syncretic mixture of leftist and right-wing policies, but it took part in the 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, the assassination of British politician Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne], and the murder of UN representative Folke Bernadotte. Afterwards, Israel declared Lehi a terrorist group, and 200 members were arrested; they were released in an amnesty in 1949.